One might answer the title of Amy Adler’s recent exhibition “What Happened to Amy?” with another question, “How did Amy manage to look so pretty during her awkward teenage years in the unfashionable ’70s?” Such concerns may seem trite, but to anyone who struggled with puberty, long hair, and peasant smocks, the breezy composure of the barefoot girl in these self-portraits is remarkable. This unflappable self-confidence is only the most obvious of the myriad ways in which the five pictures that constituted this exhibition seemed to present a false picture. The more complicated deceptions arose from the very nature of the reproductions themselves.

A Los Angeles–based artist, Adler has exhibited a number of works in the recent flurry of “queer” shows, including the important survey organized by Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake, “In a Different Light.” As removed as the works in her first New